On the front and back covers of this book are
photographs of couples dancing, on their faces expressions of euphoric delight,
rapture even, and any way you look at it, it’s the kind of thing that ought to
be stamped out, made unlawful lest such displays taint the God-fearing society
in which we live. Well, that’s what generation after generation of moralisers
would have you believe. It didn’t happen, of course, and never will, the prudes
and puritans forever as powerless to get their own way in these matters as King
Canute’s futile attempts to turn back the tide.
If
there is a theme to Peter Doggett’s sprawling, ambitious and quite remarkable 700+
page book, it is simply that in this regard history repeats itself again and
again. Each time new and more expressive forms of music are devised the moral
guardians throw up their hands in horror and demand its prohibition, which
doesn’t happen, even though the music industry often absorbs it, largely
neutralising it in the process. From jazz to rap, with rock’n’roll occupying
the lion’s share of the outrage in between, ‘hot’ music has been labelled the scourge
of mankind, or so many suppose, not least plenty in the music industry who fear
for their livelihoods. In 1955 Variety,
the US entertainment trade paper, declared that rock’n’roll was “the most
destructive force in the country… a lewd, lascivious and larcenous influence on
youth”. A major issue, of course, was that rock’n’roll was and remains
multi-racial and thus had the effect of bringing blacks and whites together. In
the UK the Daily Mail, then and now a
bastion of prurient moral values, was not slow to pick up on this point: “It is
deplorable. It is tribal. It follows ragtime, blues, jazz, hot cha-cha and the
boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether
this is the negro’s revenge.”
Beyond
this recurrent motif, Electric Shock
is Doggett’s bold attempt to tell the whole story of popular music, ‘from the
gramophone to the iPhone’ as the sub-title reminds us, and this means that concurrent
with developments in music, presented more or less chronologically from the
late 19th Century to the present day, is a history of the
technology, from tubes to discs made from shellac and vinyl to tapes to CDs and,
finally, digital tools. The relationship between the two – music and the means whereby
it can be heard – is paramount, each feeding the other, and very early on
Doggett makes the important point that until the invention of recorded sound,
all music was simply a performance that was immediately lost once it was over. As
noted by the white terrier that recognised his master’s voice coming from the
trumpet of an ancient record player, once a sound could be captured whoever
made that sound would live forever.
But
it’s the music history that fascinates more. Once the earliest recordings are
out of the way, Doggett claims with some justification that rock’n’roll
actually began with Clarence ‘Pinetop’ Smith’s 1928 recording of ‘Pine Top’s
Boogie Woogie’ and, being unfamiliar with this tune, I checked for myself and
discovered he was right. Dynamics and presentation aside, it’s not that
different from Fats Domino or even Jerry Lee Lewis. Thereafter my progress in
reading the book was impeded by countless visits to my lap top to check out this
or that piece of music I was reading about, at least until we reached Elvis, especially
Bessie Smiths ‘I’m Wild About That Thing’ which Doggett brazenly cites as an
example of a blues recording that “made a shameless declaration of how it felt
to fuck, and want to be fucked”. This was clearly worth a listen regardless of
how it might impact on my morals.
Although
Doggett nails his colours to the mast in the acknowledgements, conceding his
lifetime affair with Crosby, Stills & Nash (and, knowing him as I do, their
ancestral forebears, plus Bob Dylan and Neil Young), he leaves them at the door
once his book reaches the rock era, especially when considering popular music that
divides opinion, usually between combative critics and mainstream fans. Due
attention is thus afforded to the soundtrack albums of musicals by Rodgers &
Hammerstein that vied with Elvis in the 1950s and, more especially, to The Sound Of Music that occupied the
upper reaches of the charts alongside The Beatles a decade later. Similarly, it
may have been hard for a writer of his critical perception to devote equal
space to the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck, Vince Hill and Ken Dodd (and even,
in earlier chapters to the likes of Mantovani, Ray Coniff and James Last), as
he does to groups like The Beatles, Stones and Who but he swallows his
inclinations and manages it – no mean feat for someone who’s seen as many Dylan
concerts as I have Who shows. Indeed, on a relative basis compared to their
fame and achievements, very little space is devoted to either The Beatles or
Dylan or, for that matter, David Bowie, all of whom Doggett has written about
extensively in the past.
The
book is full of entertaining titbits like how the BBC’s first Director General
John Reith, a man whose principles were carved in granite, refused to allow
song titles to be mentioned on the radio lest it be interpreted as a form of
advertising. And who knew that the expression Whiskey A Go Go, as in the name
of numerous rock clubs, translates as Whiskey
Galore, borrowed from the title of a novel by Compton Mackenzie that became
a popular Ealing comedy?
Also,
anyone assuming that record
companies reselling the same music again and again in different formats is a
practice that came in with CDs in the 1980s is directed to a passage in which
Doggett informs us that in the early 1950s “many early LPs were simply
collections of previously released 78s, repackaged as a ‘gift’ to the artists’
fans… [and]… to explore the extended landscape of the 12-inch disc, they
embarked on another round of creative marketing, by adding a handful of additional
tracks to their existing ten-inch albums and presenting them as new product.”
There
can be no question that the amount of research Doggett undertook to produce
this extensive history was gargantuan, especially as regards music from the
pre-Elvis era. A read through the 14-page bibliography confirms as much, and
heaven only knows how many hundreds of tracks he listened to along the way. As
noted, I found myself checking out bits of music time and again, especially
where Doggett finds antecedents of rock or simply eulogises. These included Artie
Shaw’s ‘Begin The Beguine’ (1938) “which has often been proposed as one of the
finest American records of the century” and which is indeed lovely, and Tommy
Dorsey’s ‘Well Git It’ (1943) which after a meandering intro explodes into
life, detonated by a drummer attacking his kit in the manner of Keith Moon, to
be followed by raucous horns over pulsating rhythms. It was regarded as a
novelty on release but it was rock’n’roll over 10 years before the arrival of Bill
Haley and Elvis.
There
is great attention to detail throughout, information overload almost, including
many fascinating footnotes and the use of different fonts on chapter headings
that reflect typography from the various eras. Nor does Doggett limit his
investigations to the US and UK, visiting South America to discover how Latin
rhythms influenced popular music everywhere and Europe to explore how French
romanticism and German shlager made
their presence felt.
Neither
is the influence of drugs overlooked, with the case for (creatively inspiring)
and against (but deadly) left open, and I was fascinated to learn that as long
ago as 1943 Time magazine declared
that marijuana was no more harmful than alcohol and was “less habit forming than
tobacco, alcohol or opium”, an opinion with which I concur. Nevertheless the
police disagreed, and two years later raided jazz clubs on New York’s 52nd
street to the extent that one club manager decided it was less trouble to
re-open as a strip joint than to continue presenting jazz.
Each
and every genre is visited, every type of jazz dissected, preceded by ragtime
and followed by the crooners and easy listening merchants, until we reach rock,
heavy and soft, through glam and the American AOR boom in the mid-seventies,
which has never really gone away, to the almost concurrent stirrings of hip hop
and rap taking place in New York’s Bronx; from Northern Soul, reggae and disco
to electro pop, punk and new wave; from house to thrash, acid and grunge to Britpop
via the emergence of MTV, charity shows that emulate Live Aid and, finally, X-Factor
and boybands. In truth, having spent the past 40 years immersed in rock and
pop, I was more fascinated by the early chapters than those that dealt with the
music and music industry with which I am very familiar, but Doggett is never
less than illuminating, a largely unprejudiced observer with a keen eye for detail and
the means by which music is turned into money.
Now
and then, however, I found myself shaking my head when Doggett’s resolutely objective
stance slipped a little. Having brilliantly and succinctly summed up Michael
Jackson’s post-Thriller career by
stating that “he was unable to progress in any field apart from fame”, a page
later he tears into Bruce Springsteen by implying in a roundabout way that he’s
written nothing new since Born In The USA,
completely ignoring the heart-stopping live shows he has continued to stage for
the last 30 years. And while we’re at it I was disappointed that in a lengthy
passage devoted to synthesisers in Chapter 25, he failed to identify Pete Townshend’s
pioneering work in this field on Who’s
Next. Similarly, I would take issue with his statement that after switching
from the independent I.R.S. label to Warner Bros R.E.M.’s sales “went into
steep decline” when in reality the two biggest selling albums of their career
were Out Of Time (1991) and Automatic For The People (1992), both
released on Warners.
Reaching
the end, I couldn’t help but feel I’d read a very long obituary, a rather sad
and resigned tribute to 125 years of music that struggles in the modern era,
much like shops in moribund city centres. This, of course, stems principally from
the arrival of digital downloading and internet file sharing which blew aside
hitherto unquestioned assumptions about copyright protection, in the process
dealing the music industry a lethal blow. By this time the tone of the writing
had taken on a sense of regret – the penultimate chapter, largely about X-Factor and the like, is ambiguously titled ‘The
Murder Of Music?’ – that contrasted sharply with the more upbeat mood of much of
what came before, at least until the 1990s. In Doggett’s view this can also be
attributed to too much music being available today – as opposed to the gradual growth
of available music during the second half of the 20th Century – and what
Doggett identifies as a consequent “loss of perspective” for today’s consumers.
The upside of this is that “rock no longer divides generations – it unites them”
as to my immense pleasure I have had cause to discover with my own son and daughter, 48 and 45 years my junior respectively.
Of
more import to me, however, is the creative concern: that popular music in the
21st Century, competing as it does with so many other attractions,
doesn’t mean anywhere near as much to teens and twenties as it did for me in my
youth, and it never will again. That the effect of this is to stifle imagination
is, for someone like me who’s grown up with rock as a soundtrack to life, heart-breaking.
I think it is for Peter Doggett too, horrified as he was one day to hear the
music of Bob Dylan, music that once bestowed upon him an electric shock, piped
into malls as meaningless background accompaniment to shopping.
I
share his disillusionment and commend his book.
Bill Haley not "Hayley". He did rock n roll in 1952. If you'd told Buddy Rich, Tommy Dorsey's drummer, that he was playing rock n roll he'd not be best pleased.
ReplyDeleteThanks for an interesting review. I haven't had time to read Doggett's 720 page magnum opus but am looking forward to it. I can't help wondering whether, from the elegiac tone of your review ("much like shops in moribund city centre") our view of pop music is inevitably part of a baby boomer narrative. (I guess Doggett, you, me are roughly the same generation.) Inevitably pop/rock for us was becoming aware of African-American culture (via blues, R&R), changing social mores of 60s, our first sex & drug adventures. Inevitably the music is soundtrack to societal convulsions of 2nd half of 20th century as well as our own journeys. For our children it can't have the same resonance. A writer I once knew, Dave Downing, wrote an essay about 1965, The Moment of Rock, which he compared to John Berger's essay about 1912, The Moment of Cubism. These were moments in culture where the future seemed to become visible and tangible. And so so the music had huge significance for us for many non-musical reasons. Thanks for an interesting blog.
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